Hits

If you’re new to the blog and want a better idea of what I’m all about, check here are some of the posts of mine that have attracted the greatest number of hits and comments – either that, medical or I just really like them!

November 2008: “I do not hold it up as a point of comparison musically … but more as an illustration of how utterly bonkers my life was at the age of 21 and how such nights of lunacy – while hardly commonplace – provided the sort of big, multi-coloured exclamation points I never seem to hit anymore.”

May 2011: “When you think about it, it’s so easy to start a blog that they can be picked up and abandoned fairly readily. The music blogging community in Scotland is quite a close-knit one, and if there are only a few fish… in… skirts… in this particular pond, well that doesn’t mean the same is true for the entire ocean.”

June 2011: my (woefully incomplete) “30 before 30” list.

August 2011: “As a first-timer I’d expected to feel a little awkward with my dress hitched up above my waist and a small towel covering my intimates, but as I tell Christine about my blog and this project and we chatter away, her answering all my silly questions, I completely forget how exposed I am. I suppose, in this line of work, even the furriest muff is merely the equivalent of a crappy local band’s flashy Myspace profile in mine.”

January 2012: “Personally I see no reason why my love of the ‘retro-cutesy’ and my considerable intelligence cannot coexist; why I cannot keep my herbal teabags in a ceramic cupcake on the desk at my job with a major international law firm. Would it perhaps please the makers of this line of sneering argument to live in a world where there are whole professions full of women terrified to act like anything other than Margaret Thatcher for fear their bosses smell placenta on them and officially fuck their careers?”

January 2012: “Surely any lesbian with any taste at all is going to fall for Sherlock, with his quick wit and incredible social skills and pale face like a long-hardened melted candle? He’s such a man’s man that even the actor who plays him, Benedict Cumberbatch, has a name that sounds like a type of sausage.”

February 2012: “[T]he reason the piece has pissed of a lot of people is because it is an example of something that runs far deeper – a genre of music criticism which, for want of better terminology, I have been known to refer to as bearded white dude shakes his fist at things he doesn’t quite understand.”

February 2012: “So I ask you, does this make me a hypocrite? Am I allowing Collymore’s awareness-raising and one-man poster child for mental illness campaign to cancel out the fact that he once did something so abhorrent the thought of it makes me sick, while at the same time condemning Chris Brown to my inner Z-list because he makes shitty music I have no interest in and has pretty terrible teeth[?]”

April 2012: “To me, music is somewhat like a coloring book. There’s the lines and then you color it how you feel. I don’t want to take away how someone relates to music.”

August 2012: “Lashings very much started with the idea of making humour that never kicks down,” she says. “It’s no fun making fun of people who are more oppressed than you when there is so much more you can do.”

April 2013: “I just, man, I gotta learn to like myself a bit better, you know? I want to be proud and bright and beautiful and unashamed, particularly when it comes to the parts of myself I cannot help and cannot change. On my better days I am, but I’ve been struggling to hold it together recently and my self-confidence is usually the first thing to go.”

August 2013: “Occasionally I get people who come up to me – maybe older fans, or whatever – and in a slightly accusatory tone of voice they’ll go ‘you’ve changed!’ And I go ‘Yeah!’ That’s the fucking point, isn’t it? Isn’t that what we’re trying to do here?”

August 2014: “The currency question is boring. It’s designed to distract. So are the thoughts of celebrities, on either side of the debate. For months now all you hear when you tune into the media of your choice is WHERE IS THE CERTAINTY. Listen, if Alistair Darling could provide me with a personal guarantee that the UK will never again enter into recession, or that there will never be another financial crisis then I would give him my vote (side note: no I wouldnae). In 2005 were giving people whose financial circumstances were far more precarious than mine mortgages like sweeties, and telling them it was alright if they could only pay the interest.”

Believe the hype…

Last Year’s Girl... is all the things a great blog should be: well-written and passionate, with personal accounts sitting alongside wide-appeal journalism.
- The List Magazine, Best Scottish Websites

If only your scope of musical interest stretched as far as your mouth... Do us a favour and stop writing about music, keep writing the man-hating.
- Bruce Hotchkies, Scottish New Music Awards (2011-2012)